New Government Report Wraps (Davis) Bacon for Assaulting Taxpayers

Davis-Bacon wage process can be bad for taxpayers. Not news, right? Some have been warning for years that the system by which the government sets wage rates on public projects is rife with errors and, sometimes, fraud. Now there’s a new voice sounding the alarm and it’s the … uhh … federal government.

As Bloomberg reports, a new Government Accountability Office investigation is documenting the problem:

Poor data collected by the U.S. Labor Department prevents accurate calculations of the prevailing pay rate required by law on the projects, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative arm, said in a report to be released today. The department “cannot have high confidence its results” are accurate, according to the report.

Labor Department officials in many cases base the wage rates on six or fewer workers, according to the watchdog agency. It also has failed to periodically update the information to assure the data represents current conditions, according to the report.

If “prevailing wage rates are too high, they potentially cost the federal government and taxpayers more for publicly funded construction projects,” according to the report.

As the service also notes, some in the nation’s capital are taking note:

“These inaccurate wage determinations may drive up the cost of federal construction projects” and discourage competition, Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican, who leads a House subcommittee on worker protection.

Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and a member of the workforce protections subcommittee, said lawmakers aren’t sure federally funded projects paid wages that were accurate or fair.

“We can no longer accept a system that spends taxpayer dollars without any real accountability, accuracy or transparency,” Kline said.

The GAO report can be found here.